Monday, April 30, 2012

Rare finds have prompted archaeologists to rewrite the history of an ancient north Pembrokeshire stone.

The Trefael Stone, a scheduled ancient monument in a Nevern field, was originally thought to be an ancient standing stone, but is actually the capstone of a 5,500-year-old tomb, according to new research from a Bristol University archaeologist.

Dr George Nash and colleagues’ excavations at the site indicate that the 1.2m high stone once covered a small burial chamber, probably a portal dolmen, Wales’ earliest Neolithic burial-ritual monument type.

Did
agriculture in Stone Age Europe rise and spread through the gradual
transfer and diffusion of the farming idea from agriculturalists to
hunter-gatherers, or was it brought as a package by migrating
agriculturalists? Was agriculture introduced from south to north, as
the archaeological record suggests, or did it come from a different
direction?

A joint Swedish-Danish research team may have finally found some answers.

Under the leadership of Assistant Professor Anders Götherström of
Uppsala University, Sweden, and Assistant Professor Mattias Jakobsson,
also of Uppsala University, researchers used advanced DNA techniques to
study four skeletons of humans who lived in Sweden during the Stone Age,
about 5,000 years ago. They analyzed the ancient remains of three
hunter-gatherers of the Pitted Ware Culture , excavated on the island of Gotland, Sweden, and the remains of a farmer, a member of the Funnelbeaker Culture, excavated at Gökhem parish, also in Sweden.

Analyzing DNA from four ancient skeletons and comparing it with thousands of genetic samples from living humans, a group of Scandinavian scientists reported that agriculture initially spread through Europe because farmers expanded their territory northward, not because the more primitive foragers already living there adopted it on their own.

The genetic profiles of three Neolithic hunter-gatherers and one farmer who lived in the same region of modern-day Sweden about 5,000 years ago were quite different — a fact that could help resolve a decades-old battle among archaeologists over the origins of European agriculture, said study leader Mattias Jakobsson, a population geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

The hunter-gatherers, from the island of Gotland, bore a distinct genetic resemblance to people alive today in Europe's extreme north, said Jakobsson, who reported his findings in Friday's edition of the journal Science. The farmer, excavated from a large stone burial structure in the mainland parish of Gokhem, about 250 miles away, had DNA more like that of modern people in southern Europe.

Three years ago
I took a stand against ageism at the BBC. The tide is now turning against those
who judge by appearances

Mary Beard, the presenter of Meet the Romans, pictured in the
ancient Roman public latrines of Ostia. Photograph: Caterina Turroni/BBC/Lion
TV

The Sunday Times TV critic AA Gill refers to his
girlfriend as "The Blonde", nothing more. I have idly wondered in the past why
he chooses to describe her like this in his columns. Perhaps, because in our
society, and particularly in the world of male one-upmanship, "blonde" has
connotations of beauty, sex appeal and desirability. By stating so often that he
has a "blonde" on his arm, Gill probably
feels others will admire, respect, even envy him for attracting such a
golden-haired trophy.

I write this because in my view it explains
everything about the way Gill evaluates women. In his Sunday Times column this
week he started his critique of BBC2's Meet
the Romans by saying the presenter, Professor Mary
Beard, "really should be kept away from cameras altogether". Why? "Because
she's this far from being the subject of a Channel 4 dating documentary." Gill
was obviously referring to Channel 4's recent controversial series The
Undateables, about people with disabilities and their quest for love: a
programme he described in a recent review as a "mocking freak show of grotesques
and embarrassments".

Scientists in the US and Italy have borrowed a technique more usually associated
with geophysical remote sensing and applied it to medieval artwork - with
stunning results. The near-infrared hyperspectral imaging of a leaf from a 15th
century illuminated manuscript has produced a map of the pigment binders used by
the artist.

The technique will not only allow conservation specialists to
better plan strategies for restoring and stabilising paintings, but will also
give art historians new insights into the materials and methods favoured by
individual artists. Art historians and conservationists need detailed
information about materials used by artists, such as the pigments and the
organic binding agents, for example gum Arabic or egg white, which were used to
carry the pigment.

A new 150sq m (1,615sq ft) retail
and visitor centre has been unveiled at Conwy Castle in a move towards a new
design concept to be implemented at Cadw-operated heritage attractions.M
Worldwide and Datum Contracts International were chosen
by the historic environment agency last autumn to work on a flexible
approach for Cadw's sites across Wales.The concept aims to create retail
units and visitor centres reflecting the "uniqueness" of the respective heritage
site in order to improve visitor experience and attract more return visits.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Archaelogists carefully uncover more human remains at the site of a long-lost church known as All Saints, Peasholme

What to do with the remains of medieval Christians discovered beneath what used to be the Peaseholme Centre? STEPHEN LEWIS reports.

From a first glance, it looks just like any other building site that has been cleared ready for development.

It is only when you look closer that you notice the bones: fragments of skull sticking out of the earth; longer arm and leg bones; bits of what might be rib. With a slightly queasy feeling you realise that, yes, they are human remains.

This is where the Peasholme hostel on Peasholme Green once stood, and where, until the council decided to move into the West Offices instead, its new HQ was to be.

There are erotic scenes in Ancient Greece, but never are they so big and
expressive and made by such a good artist, archeologist Dimitar Nedev
said in an interview with FOCUS News Agency, referring to the vase fragments unearthed in the coastal city of Sozopol during excavations.

According to a preliminary analysis of the style, the painting was made
by one of the prominent artists in Apollonia – the Artist of the Running
Satyr.

The painting is comprised of seven figures; the scene is erotic, with
good style, expressive and very spicy, said the archeologist.

According to him the find will widen the knowledge of the region, its
trade contacts, and the aesthetic and artistic criteria of ancient
Hellenes and Thracians who used to live in this region, he said further.
Hristina TEODOSIEVA

The Turner prize winner's bouncy new interactive artwork, Sacrilege, kicks off the Glasgow international festival of visual art

King of the bouncy castle ... Jeremy
Deller's Sacrilege at Glasgow Green is part of the Glasgow international
festival of visual arts. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

"It's a bit weird and random," says Michael Mclaughlan, 50, bopping gently up and down in the middle of the giant inflatable Stonehenge that has sprung up on Glasgow Green. "They should get Alex Salmond down here to bounce about."

Around
him, children and adults are discarding their shoes and climbing
tentatively on to the grandest of bouncy castles, a large-scale
interactive work by the Turner prize winner Jeremy Deller. Titled Sacrilege, it's Deller's first major public project in Scotland and a centrepiece of the Glasgow international festival of visual art which launched on Friday.

"It's something for people to interact with, it's a big public sculpture,"
says Deller, who was on hand for the project's launch. "It is also a
way of interacting with history and archaeology and culture in a wider
sense.

When human ancestors began scavenging for meat regularly on the open
plains of Africa about 2.5 million years ago, they apparently took more
than
their fair share of flesh. Within a million years, most of the
large carnivores in the region—from saber-toothed cats to bear-size
otters—had gone
extinct, leaving just a few "hypercarnivores" alive, according
to a study presented here last week at a workshop on climate change and
human evolution at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory.

Humans have driven thousands of species extinct over the
millennia, ranging from moas—giant, flightless birds that lived in New
Zealand—to most
lemurs in Madagascar. But just when we began to have such a
major impact is less clear. Researchers have long known that many
African carnivores died
out by 1.5 million years ago, and they blamed our ancestor, Homo erectus,
for overhunting with its new stone tools. But few scientists thought
there were enough hominins—ancestors of humans but not other
apes—before that to threaten the fierce assortment of carnivores that
roamed Africa,
or that the crude stone tools that our ancestors began to wield
2.6 million years ago could be used for hunting. Besides, it was
probably much more
dangerous for the puny hominins alive then, such as Australopithecus afarensis,
whose brain and body were only a bit bigger than a chimp's, to
grab carcasses than it was for supersized carnivores such as giant
hyenas, cats, and otters to devour hominins. "One of my favorite images
is of an Au. afarensis being dragged down by a giant otter," says vertebrate paleontologist Lars Werdelin at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in
Stockholm.

The
vase was found on Sunday during digs which first started in October
2011, and target the fortress wall of what once was one of the largest
Greek polises on the Black Sea coast, and the ruins of the St. Nikolas
of Myra monastery.

It
was discovered in the oldest archaeological layers in Sozopol dating
back from the end of the 7th century to the middle of the 6th century
BC, announced Prof. Bozhidar Dimitrov, Director of Bulgaria's National
History Museum, who described the erotic scene on the vase as depicting
"group sex". as cited by Focus.

"This
vase, which was unfortunately found in several fragments, presents a
very strong erotic scene. Several naked young people, boys and girls,
are shown having sex in an unorthodox way. This is the first time such
an ancient erotic scene is found in Bulgaria," Dimitrov said, as cited
by Focus.

Specialist scanning equipment at a hospital's spinal unit is being used to shed light on early Bronze Age burial discoveries.

The
items unearthed on a Dartmoor burial site in Devon could prove to be
one of the most important archaeological finds of the last 100 years.

The
excavation, co-ordinated by Dartmoor National Park Authority,
discovered the collection of early Bronze Age remains in a burial cist -
a stone chest containing the ashes and belongings of a dead person - on
Whitehorse Hill last year.

Now, under the expert eyes of
Wiltshire Council's conservation service the items are being X-rayed to
see what secrets they may be hiding.

As human ancestors rose on two feet in
Africa and began their migrations across the world, the climate around
them got warmer, and colder, wetter and drier. The plants and animals
they competed with and relied upon for food changed. Did the shifting
climate play a direct role in human evolution?

“Is there evidence for a direct connection between changing climate
and human evolution?” Leakey asked during a keynote address Thursday.
“The answer so far is no. I don’t see it yet.”

Still, a number of scientists are on the hunt. Speakers talked about changes in plants and animals,
and how fluctuations in temperature and rainfall would have altered the
landscapes. They’re studying what carbon isotopes in soil can tell us
about changing plant life and temperature; what hominid teeth suggest
about changes in diet; and what sediment cores from the bottom of the
ocean have to say about variations in monsoon rainfall.

Tennessee was the center of the national debate when it prosecuted
John Thomas Scopes for the crime of teaching evolution. Now, 87 years
after the Scopes “monkey trial,” Tennessee is once again a battleground
over the origins of man. This month, it enacted a controversial new law
— dubbed the “monkey bill” — giving schoolteachers broad new rights to
question the validity of evolution and to teach students creationism.

The Tennessee legislature has been on a determined campaign to impose
an ideological agenda on the state’s schools. Last week, the house
education committee passed the so-called “Don’t say gay” bill, which would make it illegal to teach about homosexuality. The state senate just passed a bill to update the abstinence-based sex-education curriculum to define hand holding as a “gateway sexual activity.”

Unlike those bills, Tennessee’s “monkey bill” is now law. School
boards and education administrators are now required to give support to
teachers who want to “present the scientific strengths and scientific
weaknesses” of various “scientific theories,” including “biological
evolution” and “the chemical origins of life.” The new law also supports
teachers who want to question accepted scientific thinking on two other
hobgoblins of the far right: global warming and human cloning.

Dr David Griffiths, Reader in Archaeology at Oxford University sums up the course as follows:

"If you share with me a passion for landscape, and an urge to find
out how it has all come together and changed over time, then this course
could be for you. The landscapes we experience in the UK and in every
other part of the inhabited world are the products of human engagement
and interference with the natural environment. Agriculture, industry,
warfare, settlement and belief systems have all left their mark over the
centuries. We can use and develop field and investigative skills to
record and interpret these, and to tell the story of the landscape.
Although we make most use of UK examples on our teaching, the course has
no period or regional limits - meaning you can follow your own
interests. Landscape Archaeology is all about being out there together,
exploring the traces of our fascinating shared past."

Monday, April 23, 2012

What happened after the Romans left and the Vikings of Jorvik arrived? Two post holes and a jumble of bones may hold a clue

Field archaeologists Ian Milsted and Jim
Williams in the dig site at York Minster that hints at Saxon remains.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

When the great west doors of York Minster swing open on Thursday
and the Queen makes her way along the nave of the packed church for the
ancient service of distributing Maundy Money, she will also be walking
towards a small pit from which human bones have been pouring by the
barrow load, the remains of some of the earliest Christians to worship
on the site.

Tantalising finds include 30 skulls and a jumble of
bones used to backfill a trench by the medieval builders of the present
cathedral, and a man whose stone-lined and lidded grave was chopped off
by Walter de Gray's 13th-century walls, leaving only his shins and feet
in place.

Potentially the most significant finds are two
nondescript round holes, with groundwater bubbling up through the mud.
They are post holes that could date from the time of the earliest
Christian church on the site, after the Roman empire disintegrated in
the 5th century and before raiding Vikings arrived in the 8th century
and the Normans in the 11th century.

Archaeologists find it hard agree about the relative merits of excavating the
ancient past or leaving it undisturbed until we have the resources and
technology to preserve its remains indefinitely above ground.

Nothing of this debate is known, however, to the most famous of the creatures
which live amidst all the underground treasure: the UK's moles. And they are in
the northern news because they have been doing some excavation of their own.

Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a
Densitometer
By Kathryn M. Rudy

Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, vol 2 , no. 1-2
(2010)

Introduction: Although it is often difficult to study the habits, private
rituals, and emotional states of people who lived in the medieval past, medieval
manuscripts carry signs of use and wear on their very surfaces that provide
records of some of these elusive phenomena. One of the most obvious ways in
which a category of manuscripts—missals—carries signs of use is the damage often
found in the opening of the canon of the mass. A priest would repeatedly kiss
the canon page of his missal, depositing secretions from his lips, nose, and
forehead onto the page. In the Missal of the Haarlem Linen Weavers’ Guild, made
in Utrecht in the first decade of the fifteenth century, the illuminators
provided an osculation plaque at the bottom of the full-page miniature depicting
the Crucifixion. This plaque is designed to bear the wear and tear of the
priest’s repeated kisses, for illuminators realized that priests would damage
their paintings if they could not deflect the lips elsewhere. The priest in
Haarlem who used this missal kissed the osculation plaque some of the time, but
his lips also crept upward, onto the frame of the miniature, onto the ground
below the cross, up the shaft of the cross, occasionally kissing the feet of
Christ.

Carnivory is behind the evolutionary success of humankind. When early
humans started to eat meat and eventually hunt, their new,
higher-quality diet meant that women could wean their children earlier.
Women could then give birth to more children during their reproductive
life, which is a possible contribution to the population gradually
spreading over the world. The connection between eating meat and a
faster weaning process is shown by a research group from Lund University
in Sweden, which compared close to 70 mammalian species and found clear
patterns.

Learning to hunt was a decisive step in human evolution. Hunting
necessitated communication, planning and the use of tools, all of which
demanded a larger brain. At the same time, adding meat to the diet made
it possible to develop this larger brain.

Why is it that humans emerged from the natural world, yet we portray ourselves as modifiers of it, even its adversaries?

Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts thinks that fluctuations in the
environment in which our ancestors lived were responsible. Our ancestors
responded by becoming more versatile through a suite of changes that
included an ability to modify our environment. Potts' theory is known as the variability selection hypothesis.

Human ancestors adapted "to novelty and to change itself," he told an
audience here at a conference on climate change and human evolution at
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory yesterday (April 19).

A 2,000-year old wall surrounding an ancient
villa at Pompeii has collapsed – just two weeks after the Italian
government launched a 105 million euro project (£86 million) to save the
precious archaeological site.

The crumbling wall around PompeiiPhoto: AFP

The Special Archaeological Superintendent for Naples and Pompeii confirmed the
collapse of the red-frescoed wall next to an unidentified villa in an area
already closed to the public.

The collapse of the wall is particularly embarrassing for the government as it
follows several other incidents at the world heritage site in the past two
year .

There is growing concern Italy's
ability to protect it from further degradation and the impact of the local
Mafia or Camorra.

Giulia Rodano, cultural affairs spokesman for the centre-left Italy of Values
party, said there was a need to restore state funding that had been eroded
by government cutbacks.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Higham and
Barker’s seminal work, Timber Castles, the Castle Studies Group is
holding a one day conference on the topic on Saturday 13 October 2012 at
UCL in London.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

The origins of the iconic Irish red deer was a controversial topic. Was this species native to Ireland, or introduced?

In a new study that was published 30 March 2012 in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews, a multinational team of researchers from Ireland, Austria, UK and USA have finally answered this question.

Comparing DNA

By comparing DNA from ancient bone specimens to DNA obtained from
modern animals, the researchers discovered that the Kerry red deer are
the direct descendants of deer present in Ireland 5000 years ago.
Further analysis using DNA from European deer proves that Neolithic
people from Britain first brought the species to Ireland.

Although proving the red deer is not native to Ireland, researchers
believe that the Kerry population is unique as it is directly related
to the original herd and are worthy of special conservation status.

One of the most significant global committees that you never heard
of summoned a couple of hundred experts to the island of Menorca, Spain
last week. The meeting involved politics, the remnants of great
civilizations, human catastrophes, architectural triumphs, religious
works of art and architecture, use of tourism, the rise and fall of
empires, and did we say politics?

The International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management, or ICAHM, held its first conference
on how to manage the world’s myriad archaeological World Heritage
sites. This wildly varied array of places encompasses many of the most
celebrated sites of human cultural accomplishment and
catastrophe—everything from the pyramids and Roman fortifications to
Mongol-era tombs and prehistoric rock art. ICAHM’s key job is to advise
the World Heritage Committee about new sites proposed for the famous
list. I attended as a guest of the Congress, which paid for my travel.

Archaeologists
under the supervision of the Superintendent of Cultural Heritage of
Malta are currently monitoring on-going excavation works at the Bulebel
Industrial Estate, limits of Zejtun, after a number of tombs have been
discovered last week.

Some
weeks ago, upon issuing of a MEPA development permit, a disused factory
has been demolished to make way for a modern extension to the Actavis
Ltd factory. Upon
clearing the heaps of building debris after the demolition works and
cleaning the rock surface, a number of rock-hewn features have surfaced.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Whatever went on there, it would have impressed the ancient Britons. Even if it was only whispering.

Bits missing. But when it was all in
place, there'd have been booms, rumbles, echoes and reverberations.
Photograph: Jason Hawkes/Getty

Salford's
clever academics, who once took me shopping in a virtual supermarket –
you sat in an armchair wearing a helmet and a glove – have now recreated
the sound of Stonehenge.

We
are nowhere nearer cracking the mystery of the monument as a result;
but who would want to be? Apart from all the mountains of remaindered books of theories, a puzzle solved is never as gripping as a conundrum still under way.

An ancient megalithic structure shaped like a ship in
Sweden seems to have a similar geometry to Stonehenge, and may have been
used as an astronomical calendar, one scientist says.CREDIT: Steffen Hoejager | Shutterstock

Ancient Scandinavians dragged 59 boulders to a seaside cliff near what
is now the Swedish fishing village of Kåseberga. They carefully arranged
the massive stones — each weighing up to 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms)
— in the outline of a 220-foot-long (67-meter) ship overlooking the
Baltic Sea.

Archaeologists generally agree this megalithic structure, known as Ales
Stenar ("Ale's Stones"), was assembled about 1,000 years ago, near the
end of the Iron Age, as a burial monument. But a team of researchers
now argues it's really 2,500 years old, dating from the Scandinavian
Bronze Age, and was built as an astronomical calendar with the same underlying geometry as England's Stonehenge.

Curators
hail discovery of the first crozier excavated in Britain in 50 years
and remarkable ring in grave that had escaped robbers

English Heritage curator Susan Harrison
with the crozier discovered at Furness Abbey.

Photograph: Tony
Bartholomew/English Heritag/PA

Unexpected medieval treasures have been discovered in a grave at
one of the UK's most beautiful abbeys along with the bones of the abbot
they belonged to – probably a well-fed, little exercised man in his 40s
who suffered from arthritis and type 2 diabetes.

The discoveries were made at Furness Abbey,
on the outskirts of Barrow in Cumbria, a place that in its day was one
of the most powerful and richest Cistercian abbeys in the country.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

It's one of 46 venues across Europe nominated for the award Credit: ITV West

The Roman Baths have been shortlisted for the European Museum of the Year. It's one of 46 venues across Europe nominated for the award. Last year more than a million people visited the Heritage attraction. The winner will be announced on May the 19th.

The exterior of the Villa Romana Baláca (left) and a view of
the large replica of a mosaic floor as it would have appeared in Roman
times.

Central Europe's largest uncovered Roman-age farm estate with
more than 20 buildings, including the remains of baths, a lapidary and a
cemetery, opened its gates in Nemesvamos in western Hungary on Wednesday, a
spokesperson of the Dezső Laczkó Museum in Veszprém said.

Although installation at Villa Romana Baláca is still under
way to be fully ready for the summer, visitors can see museum experts making
finishing touches, Mona Gaspar said.

The site will be complete with a 700-thousand-piece replica of
a mosaic floor and the addition of furniture to fully evoke Roman rural life
2,000 years ago in the Roman Empire's Pannonia province.

University
of Cincinnati research is revealing early farming in a former wetlands
region that was largely cut off from Western researchers until recently.
The UC collaboration with the Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological
Project (SANAP) will be presented April 20 at the annual meeting of the
Society for American Archaeology (SAA).

UC students
Kassi Bailey (yellow shirt), Michael Crusham (blue shirt), and Kathleen
Forste (red shirt) at work on the excavation [Credit: Image courtesy of
University of Cincinnati]

Susan
Allen, a professor in the UC Department of Anthropology who co-directs
SANAP, says she and co-director Ilirjan Gjipali of the Albanian
Institute of Archaeology created the project in order to address a gap
not only in Albanian archaeology, but in the archaeology in Eastern
Europe as a whole, by focusing attention on the initial transition to
farming in the region.

"For
Albania, there has been a significant gap in documenting the Early
Neolithic (EN), the earliest phase of farming in the region," explains
Allen. "While several EN sites were excavated in Albania in the '70s and
'80s, plant and animal remains - the keys to exploring early farming -
were not recovered from the sites, and sites were not dated with the use
of radiocarbon techniques," Allen says.

The full uninterrupted grave of a Cistercian abbot
has been discovered by archaeologists at the ruins of Furness Abbey, one
of Britain's most influential medieval monasteries.

The skeleton was found by Oxford Archaeology North who were
carrying out excavations during emergency repairs at the Cumbrian site.

The rare find could date as far back as the 12th century.
The abbot's body was buried with a very rare medieval gilded crosier and
jewelled ring.

English Heritage curator Susan Harrison told Channel 4 News:
"This is really significant because it's the first time under modern
conditions that an abbatial or abbot burial has been discovered intact
with so much detail and information - from the skeleton to the mark of
his office, his crosier, his ring, but also fragments of textile in
there."

Oxford Archaeology North's Stephen Rowland told Channel 4 News:
"It's extremely rare to find such a burial. Nationally he's an
important person; he's a member of the Cistercian order which was the
most powerful monastic order in England. He would have had estates
across the Furness Peninsula, into Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire,
control over large amounts of resources. He was a bit like a feudal
overlord."

About Me

I am a freelance archaeologist and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland specializing in the medieval period. I have worked as a field archaeologist for the Department of Environment (Northern Ireland) and the Museum of London. I have been involved in continuing education for many years and have taught for the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education (OUDCE) and the Universities of London, Essex, Ulster, and the London College of the University of Notre Dame, and I was the Archaeological Consultant for Southwark Cathedral. I am the author of and tutor for an OUDCE online course on the Vikings, and the Programme Director and Academic Director for the Oxford Experience Summer School.